[In the following excerpt, Keyishian observes that Hamlet is a "good revenger" who succeeds in avenging his father's death while maintaining his moral integrity.]

COMPETING AGENDAS IN HAMLET

One of the most striking aspects of revenge tragedy is its evocation of the protagonist's struggle to marshall his or her moral, psychological, material, and tactical resources—"cause, and will, and strength, and means" (Hamlet, 4.4.45)—to avenge a horrible wrong. Required to fulfill perilous duties they cannot avoid, working as they must outside the law, revengers confront extraordinary challenges that imperil their safety, integrity, and mental stability. They are wrenched from their normal ways of life and thrust by circumstance into new and unstable roles that overlie, without effacing, their earlier, "normal" selves. Audiences easily identify with characters facing such challenges, to the degree that the pursuit of revenge is task-specific and not grounded in chronic resentment or vindictiveness. "Good" revengers display a psychological capacity to live for affirmative, constructive goals from which the pursuit of revenge has only temporarily distracted them, and to which they could revert, if they survive, after completing their tasks. Titus, Lucrece, and Junius Brutus are that sort of avenger.

So is Hamlet. But because his circumstances are more complex and his psychology more deeply explored, his revenge is necessarily more problematical. In Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare followed Kyd in making his protagonist an elderly man who, initially at least, is socially established and personally secure. In Hamlet, by contrast, Shakespeare, like other turn-of-the-century writers of revenge plays, focuses on a young avenger who, though in the fullness of his physical and mental vigor, has fewer resources of personal experience and social standing to call upon and is assailed by self-doubt and self-blame. Commanded to action by the Ghost, at times intimidated by his task, Hamlet also struggles with discrepancies between his priorities and those of the Ghost. Differently situated in existence, differently victimized, and differently related to the objects of revenge, the two have somewhat different stakes in the revenge action. These problems fatally complicate Hamlet's efforts to fulfill a duty he cannot, on personal, familial, social, and moral grounds, evade.

Hamlet does regain his footing in time to satisfy both the Ghost's interests and his own, but the playwright's method of rescuing Hamlet from his dilemma is to shift from one mode of fiction to another: to let Hamlet move, in act 5, from a Machiavellian world order to a providential one.

THE GHOST'S AGENDA

Maurice Charney's comment that "the secret murder of Hamlet's father is represented as a dermatological event" is more than a witticism about the images of skin disease that permeate Hamlet; it also suggests the personal impact on the Ghost of his revolting disfigurement.¹ He is offended by the manner of the murder, not only because of its treachery, but also and concretely because the poison Claudius used to kill him caused his body to be covered "Most lazar-like with vile and loathsome crust" (1.5.72). While it is very true that this is one of many such references in Hamlet that, according to Charney, "create a feeling of ulceration, leprosy, and cancer, all of which must be artfully concealed beneath smiling public appearances" (124), it seems clear that the violation of his "smooth body" in this repulsive way particularly oppresses and humiliates the murdered king and stands symbolically in his mind for the moral horror of the crime.

I take the Ghost to be the authentic spirit of Hamlet's late father, the national hero described by the reliable Horatio as a justifiably proud figure of great physical strength and courage. I accept Hamlet's view of him as well, as an "excellent" king and an ideal husband and father, "a man, take him for all in all" (1.2.139, 187). I take it, too, that within the world of Hamlet the Ghost expresses the moral order, that he has some sort of providential permission for what he is doing. What a humiliating fate for such a person to be disfigured so horribly, to have his life ended and his wife seduced by a betraying coward who would stoop to the use of poison, the most despised form of murder among Elizabethans.

The Ghost has, in addition, political motives for desiring revenge. He is outraged by the contamination of the state by an unworthy and unsuspected usurper: "the whole ear of Denmark / Is by a forged process of my death / Rankly abus'd" (1.5.36-38); the "royal bed of Denmark … [has become] a couch for luxury and damned incest" (82-83), not to mention drunkenness and general licentiousness. The Ghost also feels he has suffered a profound injustice: he endures torments in the afterlife (by his own account) not because he was worse than other men but because his sudden death prevented him from preparing spiritually for his end. It is to his credit that when making this complaint he acknowledges that he has committed unspecified "foul crimes" deserving of such punishment, thereby exonerating heaven from blame so that Hamlet will not be tempted to question its justice.

It is significant that the Ghost, simultaneously a suffering victim and a punishing authority, does not feel personally demoralized or diminished by the crime against him. Rather, he heaps indignant abuse upon the guilty from a position of moral and psychological security. His power to awe Horatio and the guards at Elsinore and, more crucially, to compel Hamlet's assent are evidences of his continued potency. Clearly, however, he would be diminished were his call to revenge ignored and Claudius left triumphant: he must succeed at initiating his killer's downfall. His self-confidence is founded on his justified faith that his noble son will take up his cause.

In his approach to revenge the Ghost displays a fundamental moral soundness, for though he resents the betrayals by his wife and his brother with equal passion, he meticulously differentiates between them when evaluating their offenses. He desires to reform the confused sensualist Gertrude, whom he characterizes as weak rather than sinful, but he demands death for the regicide/fratricide Claudius: a life for a life for one who murdered to satisfy his ambition and lust. The Ghost's sense of perspective and his moral balance are impressive, and his continued affection for Gertrude is very touching; these qualities raise him above the criminal Claudius and at times above his son. Most significant, of course, is the Ghost's insistence that Hamlet not "taint" his mind in the course of taking revenge—a tall order, but absolutely necessary to achieve a moral resolution to the problem of Claudius' crimes and fully vindicate the honor of both father and son.

It is also significant that the Ghost appears right after Hamlet's bitter, heartfelt denunciation of the King's boisterous carousing late into the night, an activity that, Hamlet complains, reinforces the stereotyping of Danes as drunkards. Hamlet is saddened that "the stamp of one defect" (1.4.31), no matter how minor or accidental, may disgrace a nation or an individual in the eyes of the world. We are meant to assume, I think, that the Ghost's moment of entrance is not arbitrary, but that he has overheard and approves this speech, in which young Hamlet shows he has given intelligent thought to the question of honor, both national and individual, and understands that it may be affected by many events beyond human control: accidents of birth, chance, humors, compulsions. Hamlet's knowledge of these facts is very encouraging to the Ghost, who has had to learn them the hard way.

To enlist his son in his cause and set the conditions for revenge, the Ghost alludes to the "sulph'rous and tormenting flames" in which he is "confin'd to fast" (1.5.3, 11) and conveys the horror of his condition by suggesting how Hamlet would respond if he were actually to describe it: the "lightest word" of his suffering "Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood" (15-16). Hamlet's "Alas, poor ghost!" (4) is a fitting but not fully satisfactory reaction to the Ghost's revelations and demands. Hamlet, if he loves his father, must "Revenge his foul and most unnatural murther"; his promise to sweep into action is "apt," the Ghost remarks, but not worthy of special notice:

    duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed
That rots itself in ease on Lethe wharf,
Wouldst thou not stir in this.
                                     (32-34)

The crucial thing is that Hamlet remember, that he honor his father's cause by keeping it alive. If he does, all else will follow: the state will be cleansed, the Queen redeemed, and the Ghost appropriately avenged. Having delivered his message, the Ghost remains on hand long enough to be sure that Hamlet has the self-discipline to conceal what he has been told. When he and his friends have sworn to secrecy, the "perturbed spirit" (183) can rest, satisfied, apparently, by Hamlet's responsiveness and plan of attack.

When the Ghost does return (in the "closet" scene) it is because Hamlet's treatment of Gertrude suggests he has become too obsessed with his own concerns—specifically, with his anger at his mother and his unfounded suspicions about her role in his father's death. "Do not forget!" the Ghost says, reminding his son of his promise:

                     This visitation
Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose.
                            (3.4.110-11)

The fallen Polonius is not mentioned, except by implication as (from the Ghost's viewpoint) a trivial irrelevancy, a digression from the task at hand. The rest of the speech—

But look, amazement on thy mother sits,
O, step between her and her fighting soul.
Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works,
Speak to her, Hamlet.
                                 (112-15)

—reiterates the Ghost's original concern for Gertrude's spiritual health and shows his compassion for her after the bitter, grueling excoriation that she, struggling with her awakening conscience, has just endured from Hamlet.

Having intervened to point Hamlet in the direction appropriate to his purposes, and having seen some evidence of repentance in Gertrude (more extensive in Ql than in Q2 and F), the Ghost vanishes from the play. His disappearance (and replacement by dry bones in a dusty graveyard) suggests to me that, his good work of redemption now accomplished and the necessary task of revenge again under way, he has been relieved of his purgatorial suffering. A good deal remains thereafter for Hamlet to do, but responsibility for defining what that is, carrying it out, and dealing with the consequences has fallen upon Hamlet alone.

HAMLET'S PRIORITIES

Hamlet is in many ways his father's son: he, too, holds himself to high standards and strongly values physical courage, moral integrity, self-restraint, patriotism, loyalty, and respect for women (until they betray him). But Hamlet and his father are also crucially different in character and personality. For one thing, Hamlet is psychologically incapable of sharing his father's magna-nimity toward Gertrude: her adultery seems to Hamlet as morally offensive as Claudius' fratricide. For another, while the Ghost's outrage is a product of his satisfaction with the probity of his life, his domestic virtues, the morality of his rule, and his glorious military achievements, Hamlet has no such confidence. At various points he characterizes himself as weak, morally flawed, and infirm of purpose; his mind is contaminated by feelings of impotence, self-doubt, and self-hatred; he is disillusioned, suspicious, and bitter in his dealings with others; and he is consumed by concerns we have no reason to suspect he has until he unexpectedly articulates them at some moment of tension.

There is, as well, the problem presented by Hamlet's age. The young man the Ghost is asking to take vengeance upon a reigning monarch is still at university, needs parental permission to travel abroad, and can be subjected to a public and humiliating scolding before the assembled court. These differences underlie many of the psychological tensions Hamlet experiences and explain his restless oscillations from one stance to another: embittered observer and malcontent, Machiavellian strategist, man of passion, stoic, bloody homicide, moral guide, rationalist, and, finally, fatalist.

The Hamlet we first encounter suffers the Ophelia-problem: he is a demoralized figure, alienated spiritually from the court of which he should be a central figure. When he reveals in soliloquy the deeper cause of his obvious sadness—his disappointment in his mother—his full position becomes clear: he is a victim without recourse to justice, powerless even to express his griefs:

It is not, nor it cannot come to good,
But break my heart, for I must hold my
  tongue.
                            (1.2.158-59)

Add to this his tendency to perceive his personal situation as a metaphysical condition, and we see that, bereft of hope for a better future, he is able to preserve his personal integrity only by centering himself in a reserved oppositional stance and expressing his indignation through bitterly equivocal banter with his mother and uncle.

The Ghost's revelations relieve Hamlet's despair by supplying him with a specific, energizing project on which to focus. They turn him into a new person: a young man with a sacred mission, for whom all things unrelated to revenge are "baser matter" (1.4.104). But even then Hamlet, for reasons he unfairly imputes to his weakness of character, cannot immediately act. While clear enough on his general aims, the Ghost gives his son no concrete advice about how to proceed, aside from leaving his mother to heaven and not tainting his mind in the course of taking revenge. Hamlet must deal with his difficult situation by making the most of whatever assets he has. No wonder so much of his energy goes into simply maintaining his psychic equilibrium.

Hamlet functions very much like his counterparts in the play's sources and analogues. The Amleth legend concerns a certain kind of avenger, a cunning riddler who uses the pretense of madness to distract his enemies. Maintaining an "antic disposition" (1.5.172), Hamlet keeps up his morale and at the same time con-ducts successful psychological warfare against the court: he causes the Queen to feel guilty about her "o'erhasty" marriage; he gets Polonius to blame himself for being overly suspicious of his intentions regarding Ophelia; he frustrates Rosencrantz and Guildenstern by exposing and mocking their efforts to deceive him; he causes Claudius to lose his composure in public. While all these are only partial revenges and fall short of the Ghost's call for decisive action, they manifest a capacity to unsettle his enemies that alleviates Hamlet's sense of impotence. Of course, in Shakespeare's treatment of the Amleth story the protagonist, afficted by doubts, anxieties, and contradictory purposes, lives a tumultuous inner life. He is, notoriously, a searching analyst of his psychic condition and a severe critic of his performance; he is concerned with such broad questions as the relative culpability of all human agents, including himself.

Earlier I compared Hamlet's predicament to Ophelia's, noting that they are both afflicted by feelings of personal impotence. We may also contrast it to Laertes' moral impotence. Polonius' parting advice to his son is not merely a set of observations about youth in general, but a pointed and well-considered analysis of his character. As the play will reveal them in his manner of pursuing vengeance, Laertes' faults include talking too much and acting out "unproportioned" thoughts (1.3.60); being unselective in choosing friends and mentors; being quarrelsome, but not handling himself well when in a quarrel; making premature judgments; acting without personal integrity and, as a consequence, being false to others. In addition, the man he is avenging is, in our experience, less the "noble father" (4.7.25) he fondly recalls than the "intruding fool" (3.4.31) Hamlet calls him. (While that does not justify killing him, of course, it does suggest that blame for his death is not all Hamlet's.) As Hamlet's foil, Laertes helps point up the power of his intellect and the moral integrity, in the midst of his psychological turmoil, of his engagement with his task.

Unlike Laertes, as we see in his response to the Pyrrhus speech, Hamlet is concerned about his emotional adequacy for the job at hand. Since he has asked to hear a vivid description of the actions of a revenger who is "total gules," "roasted in wrath and fire," "o'er-sized with coagulate gore" (2.2.457, 461, 462), it seems at first that he is vicariously living out a bloody revenge. But in the end what most strikes him about the Pyrrhus speech is not, as we might expect, the revenger's behavior—he does not say, "I think I'll become, like Pyrrhus, a raging homicide"—but the actor's disproportionate portionate response to Hecuba's fictional grief. While it seems to Hamlet "monstrous" (551) that an actor could be physically transformed by the mere idea of grief, it seems even worse that someone with a cause as compelling as his could be as undemonstrative as he has been. Deciding (for the moment) that a lack of sufficient passion is at the heart of his problem, he picks at himself, applying standards that necessarily make him feel like a failure.

In the earlier revenge tradition, represented by The Spanish Tragedy and Titus Andronicus, the protagonists' worst moments of distress and misery occur while they wander in ignorance of their true situation. Once they identify their enemies, they get on with the job of revenge vigorously, efficiently, and wittily. Impotence drives them mad; revenge makes them sane. In the revenge revival, as represented by Hamlet and Antonio's Revenge, knowing the facts is not enough; the protagonists suffer internal conflicts that prolong their misery. Marston's Antonio is torn by the command of his father's ghost that he slaughter the innocent Julio; he is devastated by the death of Mellida; Hamlet turns his anger against himself for being slow to take revenge.

But after an explosion of passion and self-denunciation, he comes to see that mere rant is equally unworthy of him. He understands that though he may not have acknowledged them, there were good reasons not , to rush to take revenge. He asks the actors to perform The Murder of Gonzago not only to resolve his doubts about the Ghost's veracity and the reliability of his own responses—doubts logical enough, in retrospect, but somewhat startling when they appear—but to establish motives he can call his own: "I'll have grounds"—grounds "more relative" (603, 604), more closely related to ascertainable facts and (even more to the point, I think) to Hamlet's own concerns.

Hamlet's sudden expression of uncertainty about the Ghost's veracity is sometimes characterized as irresolution, an excuse to delay doing his duty. I take it, rather, as an effort to keep himself on track and strengthen his footing. To the self-accusatory question Why have I not acted before this?, Hamlet replies with a serious variation of a Falstaffian idea: that he might have been a coward on instinct. As the lion will not harm a true prince, so a true prince would hesitate to follow the directions of a false ghost. In addition, putting on The Murder of Gonzago forwards his efforts to disconcert the court and gives him the chance to alleviate his isolation by sharing his problems and perceptions with Horatio.

The "To be or not to be" soliloquy advances the revenge theme by relating Hamlet's immediate situation to the general question of how to deal with sufferings and wrongs that cannot be ascribed to some particular, malicious enemy, but are caused by the general and intractable conditions of existence—outrageous fortune, seas of troubles, the passage of time, nameless oppressors, the prideful, false lovers, unresponsive officials of state, and unworthy persons in general. Should one face such evils stoically, or adopt a stance of active, if unfocused, heroism? Or is it better to escape into death, on the assumption that death is oblivion? Or, since it is impossible to know what follows death (never mind, for the moment, the Ghost), do you let your apprehensions paralyze you and merely endure life as best you can? Taking the soliloquy as a more or less free-floating general statement about the fundamental insolubility of the human dilemma—as it seems, by its Q2 and Fl placement, the author meant it to be—it appears that Hamlet is afflicted by endless and inconclusive speculations that consume themselves and bring him to a stalemate.

But his confrontation with Ophelia thrusts him back into the action. Hamlet is furious to discover he is being spied upon and, apparently, betrayed by one he trusted: like his father, he has been caught with his guard down, when alertness has been his main and most reliable defense. His list of enemies seems to have multiplied to include those he thought his friends, and his humiliation of Ophelia during the play scene is his petty revenge upon her for seeming too like his mother. Hamlet the avenger has tried to retreat—or advance?—to a consideration of general issues, but events have overtaken him. He has begun to accumulate his own list of grievances, in addition to the Ghost's.

That The Murder of Gonzago is designed more to confront Hamlet's concerns than his father's is clear from its contents (regardless of which lines Hamlet himself wrote). First, it does not stress the motives of the murderer, who appears only briefly, but the shallowness of the Player Queen, whom the Player King responsibly and sensitively prepares for his impending death by anticipating with approval that she, who will "live in this fair world behind, / Honor'd, belov'd," might go on to remarry "one as kind" as himself (3.2.175-77). It is the Player Queen who characterizes remarriage as "treason," declaring,

In second husband let me be accurs'd!
None wed the second but who kill'd the first.
                                      (179-80)

Through these lines, Hamlet avenges himself on the Queen for the hasty remarriage that mocked her florid displays of grief over King Hamlet's death.

Earlier in the play, the audience was reminded of the extent to which humans are subject to chance: Hamlet, in act 1, scene 3, remarked on the ways our reputations may be completely corrupted by the possession of a single flaw, for which we might not even be responsible. Similarly, in act 3, scene 2, the Player King speaks of the unreliability of human purpose, which is subject to memory and passion, and of the fickleness of worldly opinion, which follows only the fortunate. He concludes with a lesson many people in the play, Hamlet included, will come to learn:

Our wills and fates do so contrary run
That our devices still are overthrown,
Our thoughts are ours, their none of our own.
                                   (211-13)

To the insight that human activities are subject to external chance, the Player King adds the observation that we are also subject to the instability of our mental processes: we are weak or forgetful. "What we do determine, oft we break," for the reason that "purpose is but the slave to memory, / Of violent birth, but poor validity" (187-89). These are the tragic conditions under which Hamlet must pursue his revenge, subject to vagaries of existence that thwart his plans and momentarily undercut his faith in the fundamental justice of the universe.

Though earlier distressed at his own lack of emotion, Hamlet, in the moments before the playing of The Murder of Gonzago, becomes more concerned about the danger of excess passion. He recommends that the actors perform with a "temperance" (7) that will forward the purposes of their art. More particularly, Hamlet praises Horatio for his equanimity, for being one of those

Whose blood and judgment are so well co-
  meddled,
That they are not a pipe for Fortune's finger
To sound what stop she please.
                                     (69-71)

Especially at this moment, Hamlet requires the example of a man who is not "passion's slave" (72): in keeping with the Ghost's injunction that he not "taint" his mind while taking revenge, he is, wisely, concerned about his mental state, especially since he feels capable of performing prodigies of violence—"such bitter business as the day / Would quake to look on" (391-92). Hamlet's main goal at the end of this scene is to convert his mother by forceful, even "cruel" rebukes; his main fear is that his passion will spill over into violence, that "the soul of Nero" will enter his "firm bosom," that he will become "unnatural" (395-96).

In act 3, scene 2, Hamlet has an unexpected opportunity to kill the King, but on terms he finds unacceptable. He is offended at the thought that Claudius' soul might be saved while his father still suffers for his sins. This moment had been foreshadowed earlier in the play by the revelation in Hamlet of a sometimes exquisite sensitivity to questions of fairness. To Horatio, he had spoken of meeting his "dearest foe in heaven" (1.2.182) as the circumstance he would find most un-bearable. Because he would not subject his father to that indignity—of seeing his dearest foe in heaven, before him—Hamlet passes up his first clear chance to kill Claudius. His feelings in this regard are psychologically understandable, but succeeding events suggest that Shakespeare wants to convey a sense that they are morally tainted. If heaven is "ordinant" in this, Hamlet's precipitous, impulsive, and ultimately self-destructive killing of Polonius—the discharge of the pent-up feelings he left unacted—may be punishment for his nasty wish.

In the closet scene, Hamlet brings up the issues that have most troubled him. Some of these are the same ones mentioned by his father: Gertrude appears to have no standards; her judgment is corrupt; she does not act her age; she is shameless. But coming from Hamlet, these accusations seem wild and unbecoming. In addition, and quite unexpected—one of those concerns we were unaware he had—is Hamlet's suspicion that Gertrude had been Claudius' accomplice in murder. The accusation amazes Gertrude and adds so much to the heat of Hamlet's assault that the Ghost intervenes to protect her. But, as Peter Mercer points out, Hamlet's very excesses seem to act as an emotional purge:

Whatever our discomfort with the ferocity of Hamlet's attack on his mother … that encounter seems actually to have liberated him from the burden of disgust and outrage that has weighed him down since the beginning of the play.²

Having gotten this accusation out of his system—and then having it convincingly refuted not only by Gertrude's amazed denial but by the Ghost's implicit repudiation of the charge—he feels freer to concentrate on the "sport" of his coming confrontation with Claudius.

Hamlet's state of mind is relatively clear at this point. He understands that the death of Polonius will have dire consequences, but he is not oppressed or diverted from his goals on that account. In no doubt of Claudius' guilt, he insults him fairly freely. Their war is still somewhat covert—each for his own reason retains the fiction of Hamlet's madness—but each is aware of the other's motives and feelings.

In the Q2 soliloquy "How all occasions," Hamlet again assesses himself and again comes to fresh conclusions about himself. The Ghost had cited memory as a sacred function, capable of motivating noble actions; in "O what a rogue," Hamlet had thought of the ability to feel passion as a great test of character; to Horatio, he had praised the virtue of self-control. In this soliloquy, he elevates reason to the head of the list of noble motives. It is because our Creator has given us "god-like reason" that we must be revengers; that is what separates us from the beasts who only "sleep and feed" (4.4.35), who live in "oblivion" (38). To do otherwise is a perversion of reason, which can too easily be the disguise of that "craven scruple / Of thinking too precisely on th' event" that contains "but one part wisdom / And ever three parts coward" (40-43).

And yet within a few lines he concludes, against reason, that one should above all be ruled by considerations of honor, that the proper stance for one with a cause like himself—one who has had "a father kill'd, a mother stain'd, / Excitements of my reason and my blood" (57-58)—is to have nothing but "bloody" (66) thoughts. And this at the very moment that he is leaving Denmark, under guard and at the King's bidding, for an indeterminate amount of time. At moments like this, Hamlet's restless mind provides him no stable point from which to act or even to evaluate his actions; it leaves him more than ever prey to impulse and chance. For all his brave words and noble intentions, he has, on a human level, made a botch of things: the King lives, Polonius is dead, Ophelia will go mad, and Laertes will become his deadly enemy. We may not hold him guilty, and we may feel that he was never given a satisfactory chance to discharge the full range of his responsibilities; however, it remains true that no position he has adopted, in his unaided quest for revenge, has yielded the desired result. What happens thereafter, I would like to argue, reflects a sort of Euripidean manipulation.

HAMLET'S RESIGNATION

I have rather lightly exonerated Hamlet from deeds for which others have severely taken him to task. Account me one of the "general gender,"

Who, dipping all his faults in their affection,
Work like the spring that turneth wood to
  stone,
Convert his gyves to graces.
                                   (4.7.18-21)

Those "gyves"—for which read, in the context of the play, his trials and constraints, his dilemmas and errors—are the means by which Shakespeare invites his audience to identify with his articulate and attractive protagonist. It is Claudius, after all, who sneers at the inconvenient love the populace has for the only man capable of unasking his crimes.

Shakespeare is not alone in adopting such an attitude toward a compromised tragic hero. J. W. Lever has pointed out that rather than follow the Aristotelian model, in which characters with fatal flaws are brought down "by the decree of just if inscrutable powers," some Jacobean playwrights, reflecting the philosophic turmoil of a time in which the consolidation of state power was being challenged by subversions old and new, adopted the view that whatever faults of deficiency or excess their heroes exhibited, "the fundamental flaw is not in them but in the world they inhabit." Therefore, Lever argues, "in Jacobean tragedy it is not primarily the conduct of the individual, but of the society which assails him, that stands condemned."³ As I noted earlier, I believe this view of things (chronology aside) largely exonerates Titus for his excesses; it also reaches to Hamlet, who fits Lever's decription of a hero "faced with iniquity on high, with crimes committed by a tyranny immune to criticism or protest," who is confronted "with the imperative necessity to act, even at the price of his own moral contamination" (12-13).

To constitute the audience as a forgiving community willing to identify with the cause of a protagonist who has not only risked but also suffered contamination in the pursuit of righteous goals, the playwright lifts from him the burden of initiating action on behalf of justice. A centered Hamlet, satisfied that though he has not always done the right thing he has always pursued a just cause, is allowed to transcend contamination by resigning himself to death and waiting for evil to undo itself.

On his return from his aborted trip to England, it is clear that Hamlet is seeking the long view with regard to all questions, including revenge. More particularly, we see that his rage is now focused on Claudius, and that he has acquired new and strong reasons of his own for wanting revenge on the King. Hamlet brings to his final encounters a balance of engagement and detachment that issues from his at last coming to feel himself properly grounded with respect to providence, his relations to others, and himself. To be sure, he can still be surprised, enraged, saddened—as his struggle with Laertes at Ophelia's gravesite demonstrates—but he is secure in the thought that he is on the right track at last. Great spiritual changes seem to have taken place in Hamlet, as though he had literally been away for the several years Amleth spent in England. Indeed, the Gravedigger speaks of both Hamlet and his father in the past tense, as figures of history. In the interim, Hamlet has come to see most human activity—the quibbling of lawyers, the trading of land, the climbing of social ladders—as petty and mean, ending in the dust of the graveyard. It is hard to maintain much overt passion for revenge when viewing life from such a philosophic distance.

But again Hamlet is not permitted to stay disengaged for long. Ophelia's "maimed" (5.1.219) funeral rites and Laertes' flamboyant mourning gestures elicit a passionate response from him and lead to a conflict between the two young men that plays directly into Claudius' hands. Hamlet's assault on Laertes is based on a mental lapse, as he admits later: he should have appreciated the similarities in their situations. He cannot, however, because he is offended by what he had earlier admired: the capacity to express passion, which, coming from Laertes, seems now melodramatic rant and emotionalism. But Hamlet's parting words, after the scuffle in the grave, exhibit his continuing, if grim, obsession with justice. Whatever happens, people will eventually express their true natures and be rewarded appropriately: "The cat will mew, and dog will have his day" (292).

This expression of faith in some sort of providence or moral inevitability is not new to Hamlet's consciousness: he has asserted the belief that

                     Foul deeds will rise,
Though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to
  men's eyes.
                                   (1.2.257)

He has acknowledged the limitations placed upon us by divine law, the "canon 'gainst self-slaughter" (132). But he has more often spoken of existence as chaotic, subject not only to human will but also to mere chance. He knows that men may suffer unjustly because of their birth, "wherein they are not guilty / (Since nature cannot choose his origin)" (1.4.25-26); he speaks of the meaningless depredations humans suffer at the hands of "outrageous fortune" (3.1.58); he praised Horatio's indifference to "Fortune's buffets and rewards" (3.1.58), which are unrelated to merit.

Therefore, Hamlet's expression of wholehearted faith in providence does strike a fresh note, as he excitedly tells Horatio the details of his adventures at sea:

Our indiscretion sometime serves us well
When our deep plots do pall, and that should
  learn us
There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.
                                   (5.2.8-10)

His impulsive decision to pick the pockets of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern uncovers the King's plot against him; his youthful training in writing "fair" (34), which he had resented and "labor'd much / How to forget" (34-35), provides the skill to forge a letter to the English king; his possession of his father's seal helps make the forgery seem authentic. These events heighten Hamlet's sense of himself as a man on a special and sacred mission who need not be conscience-stricken by the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (and, by implication, Polonius). He dismisses them all with the thought that

                     Their defeat
Does by their own insinuation grow.
'Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes
Between the pass and fell incensed points
Of mighty opposites.
                                          (58-62)

They are not on his conscience because they involved themselves in matters beyond their comprehension—a harsh doctrine, but no harsher than the Calvinist determinism so powerfully shaping Protestant thought at the time, and consistent with Hamlet's now secure sense of mission.

There is great assurance and firmness in Hamlet's final summary analysis of his reasons for revenge:

Does it not, think thee, stand me now upon—
He that hath kill'd my king and whor'd my
  mother,
Popp'd in between th' election and my hopes,
Thrown out his angle for my proper life,
And with such coz'nage—is't not perfect
  conscience
To quit him with this arm? And is't not to be
  damn'd,
To let this canker of our nature come
In further evil?
                                   (63-70)

Again, Hamlet startles us with a new motive: that Claudius cheated him of the crown that was rightfully his. But he also expresses a new justification for revenge. Since Claudius represents the fundamental flaws of human nature, original sin itself, hating him is a moral obligation; by rooting him out, we cure ourselves of a deadly ill. This conclusion further clears Hamlet's conscience and removes more barriers to action.

But it also removes incentives to action. Why plan deeply when providence is at work, and clearly on your side? One need only watch one's chance and accept what providence brings. Earlier, he had, though repenting his killing of Polonius, accepted it as somehow an act ordained:

        heaven hath pleas'd it so
To punish me with this, and this with me,
That I must be their scourge and minister.
                                (3.4.173-75)

And now Hamlet elects to ignore his own forebodings and "defy augury" with the thought that "There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow" (5.2.219-20). Providence delivers Claudius into his hands, as James Calderwood points out, for a double killing and a dual revenge. Hamlet's first killing of Claudius, by swordtip, is "not for his father but for himself, not in response to the Ghost's command but in direct retaliation for the attack on his own life." But there is a second killing of Claudius: forcing the poisoned wine down his throat after the quite sufficient act of stabbing him. "Hamlet stabs Claudius for himself, but poisons him for his father."⁴

His revenge accomplished, at peace with himself at the point of death, Hamlet is concerned that the truth be known. In a gentler version of his father's request—to remember him—Hamlet assigns his friend the task of telling his story and ensuring that his private sense of accomplishment at having maintained his integrity and fulfilled his moral duty will be conveyed to the world at large and woven into the fabric of a renewed state. A psychological account of Hamlet would focus on his final mood, especially his ability to be at peace with himself: to be "centered" and feel, in Plato's sense, the inner harmony of the just man. Shakespeare's culture offered him the concept of providence as a means of expressing that settled state of mind, but it is equally well described, I think, in terms of Hamlet's acceptance of himself as a mortal being doing his best under terrible conditions.

That Hamlet will die at the end of the play is as much a matter of dramatic convention as of anything in the play's internal dynamics or the psychology of the characters: the killing of Polonius and the death of Ophelia are events that arouse audience expectations of his death. What is in the playwright's hands is how his revenger will meet that fate. Having inflicted upon Hamlet a full range of emotional and moral distress, the psychological burden of impotence in the face of evil, ironies of fate and treacheries of fortune, Shakespeare in the end confers upon him a sanctified, redemptive death that proclaims him a definitive—and multifaceted—hero. He has upheld his own values: the aggrieved youth Laertes, who has also stumbled seeking revenge, forgives him for the death of Polonius; the philosopher Horatio says he died deserving a singing escort to heaven; and he has upheld his father's values as well: his successor Fortinbras grants him the burial rites of a soldier and a king.

And yet we would be right, I think, to see the very invoking of providence as testimony to the power of the revenge theme to open unresolvable questions of justice and order, questions that we, like Hamlet, might have liked the chance to consider. The playwright has provided an emotionally satisfying closure, but it is in a different mode than the play that precedes it [King Lear], and it has taken an act of God to provide it. …

Notes

¹ Maurice Charney, Hamlet's Fictions (New York: Routledge, 1988), 123.

² Peter Mercer, Hamlet and the Acting of Revenge (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987), 227.

³ J. W. Lever, The Tragedy of State (London: Methuen, 1971), 10, 12. Lever goes on to say, usefully, that with regard to characters in Renaissance drama, "What really matters is the quality of their response to intolerable situations. This is a drama of adversity and stance, not of character and destiny."

⁴ James L. Calderwood, To Be and Not to Be: Negation and Metadrama in "Hamlet" (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 46. Another account of the relationship between Hamlet and his father is provided by David Scott Kastan, for whom Hamlet's delay reflects his unwillingness to become like either the father who urges revenge or the uncle on whom it would be visited: "Only when he can persuade himself that revenge is a mode of restoration rather than reprisal can Hamlet move toward its execution, but always he is reminded of the inescapable relatedness of victim/villain/avenger" ("'His Semblable Is His Mirror': Hamlet and the Imitation of Revenge," Shakespeare Studies 19 [1987]; 113).